Did You Know?…

Here are some tips to eat well when budget cooking is your goal:

Buy fresh food that is locally grown and in season. Not only will you be supporting the farmers who work hard to provide us with our food, you will get more nutrition from food that is at its peak of freshness. Buying food when it is in season will be much easier on the budget too.

Buy packaged and canned goods when they are on sale. See something you enjoy eating at 50% off? Don’t just buy one. If you have any storage room at all, buy several, as long as you can eat them before they expire or go bad.

Meat is a large part of most dinner menu budgets. Cheap recipes are really recipes that stretch things out. We don’t need an 8 to 12 ounce portion of steak to be healthy. In fact many nutritional experts will say that our Western culture eats far too much meat.

If you are cooking on a budget and are using meat, find recipes that stretch the meat out, so each person gets about 3 ounces of meat. Mixed with a variety of vegetables, which are a large part of healthy low cost cooking, no one will even notice they are eating less meat.

Mix in some vegetarian dinners with your meat based dinners. We don’t need to eat meat every day. I have included some delicious meatless options for budget cooking too.

Include beans and legumes in your budget menus. They are very nutritious and provide low fat protein and fiber, while being very low in cost.

Look for bargains in the clearance area of the produce section of your grocery store. Bananas, peppers, apples and much more are sometimes packaged up and sold at a low price when they are just past their prime. Look them over carefully though – if the food is actually spoiled it’s no bargain. And of course anything you do buy in that section needs to be eaten immediately.

Most of the recipes on this site that call for chicken breasts can be made just as easily with cheaper chicken legs. When chicken legs are on special, scoop them up and put them in the freezer in meal size amounts.

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